Transforming Organisations

The Housing Ombudsman Service

We are working with the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) to support staff to build on their existing knowledge of human rights and how to apply them within their work through both a capacity-building and an additional learning sets programme.

These workshops were designed to complement the Housing Ombudsman Service’s new internal guidance on the Human Rights Act 1998 and The Equality Act 2010.

How we designed the programme

BIHR have been working together with HOS to support them to embed human rights within the service. HOS has recently published internal guidance on the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act to guide their work. They asked us to design and deliver capacity building workshops to complement this guidance and increase human rights knowledge and confidence across the service.

We started to design the workshops following a mapping session we held with key staff members at HOS. We used the information we gathered here, as well as our knowledge of the role of HOS, to design bespoke human rights staff capacity building workshops.

In January 2024, BIHR began delivery of the first of our two-part human rights staff capacity building programme for staff working in a range of roles across the service. The aim of the programme is to build on the existing human rights knowledge within the service, and to support HOS staff to reflect on how they can apply human rights in their work and decision making.

We are also designing additional learning sets for a smaller cohort of HOS staff to build upon what they have learnt already. These learning sets aim to further embed a culture of respect for human rights within HOS and their work, and to provide practical frameworks for using human rights.

About the programme

Two-part staff introductory human rights programme:

We developed this two-part programme starting with an introduction to human rights law and a refresher workshop with a focus on putting rights into practice. Each part of the two-part workshop will run for ten sessions, which means that by the time the programme ends, we will have delivered twenty workshops for 300 HOS staff members on human rights and the Human Rights Act. The workshops began in January 2024 and will end in May 2024.

Three-part Additional Learning Sets programme:

Using the existing knowledge and expertise within HOS and building on the two-part capacity building workshops, the additional learning sets have been designed for a smaller group of HOS staff to explore practical ways of considering human rights in their work and embedding a culture of human rights.

This will involve a deep dive into the human rights that are particularly relevant to HOS, and some frameworks that can be used to make sure these rights can be considered and articulated in their decision making and across the organisation.